Hot Under The Bonnet

For some strange reason I’ve been getting the feeling that I should take a look under my car’s bonnet (that’s the hood for those who speak American) for quite a while. Call it gut feeling or sixth sense but I’ve been preoccupied with cramming and I took it for granted.

Tonight I finally succumbed to the gut feel and took a look under the hood. At first I didn’t notice anything amiss. I took a second look and noticed that the coolant reservoir was white. It was usually tinged green due to the coolant. I should’ve noticed that immediately. I went to open the cap of the reservoir and found out that it was loosely screwed on.

The last time I looked under the bonnet was a couple of weeks before I brought in the car for servicing and the coolant reservoir was full back then. I see a very pitiful puddle on the bottom of the reservoir as I peeked though the opening. The crew must’ve forgotten to tighten the cap when they topped it up. That was a little over two months ago. Dang! Two months is such a long time. Who knows how long that reservoir has been empty. For all I know I could’ve been driving without coolant and damaging my car for close to two months. I hope I haven’t done too much damaged. So friggin’ stupid! I’ve just been lucky that my car hasn’t overheated.

I ran upstairs to the apartment to get the bottle of coolant that I keep for topping up in case the coolant drops below the minimum line. It was about three quarters full. I emptied it into the reservoir and yet it was still a centimetre or so below the minimum line. It’s going to have to wait until tomorrow.

Dang! Sometimes it’s tough knowing next to zilch about cars and the only thing I know I don’t do often enough – check the fluid levels that is. This is what I get for listening to what that old bloke said, “If you have a new car and you have it maintained by an authorised service centre you don’t have to look under the bonnet.”

Oh well... There’s always the next time.

Exam On Metallurgy (Or My Cramming Was Definitely Not Iron Clad)

Load off my shoulder. Finally took the exam that I’ve been cramming for, for the past three weeks. Three weeks isn’t cramming you say? To me it is, when you have about 300 pages of materials, loaded with jargon that could’ve been Sumerian for all I know, that you have to go through. This last week was really terrible as I always slept well past midnight then having to wake up at six to get ready for work. Well, I’m done with it for now. Hopefully, I pass so that I can be done with it period.

A friend of mine told me that I’m probably an adrenaline junkie and since I can’t get my kicks off the way the rich kids do, I do it the way I know how. I study for exams at the last minute, stress about what I might have missed and then stress about the possibility of failing. Definitely a weird way to go about getting an adrenaline high, if you ask me I’d rather jump out of a plane. With a parachute on of course.

As has become my tradition, I went to a movie after the exam. And the timing was just right because Iron Man just came out yesterday. I’ve never really been a big fan of the comic book and the character. I was thought that Tony Stark was little too serious. Thank Robert Downey Jr. was able to make him seem serious and flippant at the same time. It made the character enjoyable to watch.

As for the CGI, it was really good. I could believe that it a real aromor. Anyway, to me it seemed no different from most sports cars that you can seen on the movies though I’m not really sure if a sports car is a good comparison.

The action scenes were short and sweet which makes you want to ask for more. I read reviews saying that the final confrontation seemed rushed through but I beg to disagree. I thought it was just right. We didn’t need to see a long drawn out battle between two armor powered individuals. We needed to see some explosive moments, some pounding and some flying. It also gave us a fast thinking Hero who could finish the fight without too much chitchat.

When the movie ended, i hadn’t thought that two hours had passed but two hours did and it wasn’t a wasted two hours. If you’re looking for some good old superhero comic movie, you definitely gotta go see Iron Man.